A Brief Recent History of Marijuana Cookbooks

Stoners, the wait is over: This week, Publishers Marketplace announced that High Times is releasing The Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook, so that all you space cake-lovers will finally be able to make magic baked goods that don’t taste like charred drugs. It’s unclear what the cookbook will contain as of yet — just THC-infused recipes or things on the munchies end of the scale as well? — but it’s only the latest contribution in a trend of haute cannabis cuisine. In fact, on the latest season of Top Chef, Tom Colicchio complimented one contestant by calling their dish a total stoner hit. Before you know it, there’ll be a mash-up of Mastering the Art of French Cooking with “The Dummies Guide to Growing.” But until that day comes, we’re doing our part to sate your cravings with our brief and incomplete history of marijuana cookbooks, after the jump.

Cooking with Cannabis by Adam Gottlieb
As any good weed historian knows, hemp and its related products has been used in food for centuries — as medicine in Rome and China, and as food in Arabia as early as 900 AD. But as far as we know, there are few classic cookbooks (cook-scrolls?) from those times, and, even if they existed, we’re guessing that hemp nut gruel wouldn’t be that awesome. The modern era’s classic bingus tomes didn’t begin cropping up until the 1960s and 1970s, and Adam Gottlieb’s The Art and Science of Cooking with Cannabis is one of the seminal references. Published in 1974, it’s now in the third edition, and gives advice on how to get the most out of your purple haze. The recipes aren’t particularly revolutionary — the tastiest-looking thing is probably the hashish candy — but the foundational techniques were taken to heart by a generation of cannabis cooks to come.